Here's an article for the next issue:

Cheap and Dirty (but mostly dirty) Ways to Make a Buck this Summer
By VIRGINIA VICKERY
virginiavickery@gmail.com

Sell your plasma
Return the bottles after you drink away your weekends
Sell books to Powell’s – don’t kid yourself, you’re never going to actually finish Moby Dick
Buy clothes at Goodwill and sell then to Buffalo Exchange
Compete in amateur strip nights
Sell your sperm or eggs (if you’re a woman, ask to see porn magazines before your egg extraction procedure. It’s not fair that only guys get them.)
Wash windows or sell fake roses at intersections
Sell squirts from a spray bottle fan on the three days it gets over 90 degrees
Become an impromptu bathroom attendant at bars – hand people towels and lotion their hands
Play whatever instrument you think you’re good at downtown with the case open – for a little extra change sell a home recorded CD
Start a pyramid scheme – you might lose a few friends but you will have made a few dollars
Be a cold call telemarketer (not for the faint of heart, must be unfazed by extreme hatred)
Be an asshole and canvass for the starving whale children or whatever
Become an email spammer
Gold farm in World of Warcraft – the Chinese do it and make a killing
Valet park cars at upscale joints and undercut the legit guys.
Find a sugar mama or daddy
Scalp tickets to the Beavers and Timbers games
Hold a bake sale courtesy of Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker and the Pillsbury Dough Boy
Set up lawn chairs on the water front and charge by the hour
Pirate DVD’s and sell them out of a suitcase
Take that fondue pot your aunt gave you that you never use and sell fondue at the Saturday market – those yuppie suckers will buy anything handmade
Become a motivational speaker (see Chris Farley as Matt Foley on SNL circa 1993)
Buy cigarettes by the carton and sell each cigarette you get bummed for downtown for a $1 – Portlanders are such mooches that you’d make major bank in just one Saturday night
Become an escort and advertise on Craigslist and in the Mercury
Buy cases of beer and sell them by the can for a $1 on the Sandy River
Sell boxes filled with rocks on eBay as high-end stereo equipment
Steal your neighbor’s credit card bill and live through the Internet for the summer
Draw people’s caricatures in Pioneer Square – those things always suck anyway so no experience necessary
Start an off track-betting ring
Underground Cock fighting ring
Become an impromptu downtown tour guide and just make shit up. Out of towners won’t know the difference
Fashion a tattoo gun from an electric toothbrush and a broken fountain pen and the hipsters will come a-runnin’. If you feel like being an asshole, just use hemp ink.
Sell hemp jewelry and power crystals at Max stops
Give buzz cuts with a pair of clippers on a corner somewhere – you’d probably do a better job than Bishop’s anyway
Open a lemonade stand courtesy of Country Time and Minute Maid
Walk dogs
“Collect” copper from around downtown and sell it – copper goes for a lot these days
Become an impromptu elevator attendant in your building – all you have to do is refer to your neighbors as “ladies” and “gents” and press some buttons
Put an out of order sign on a payphone, sit next to it and sell airtime on your cell phone during your free night and weekend hours
Set up a kissing booth
Shine shoes
Get a cop uniform and rent yourself out as security for events
“Harvest” vegetables from community gardens and sell them at the Farmer’s Market
Charge admission to the drinking fountains downtown
Write and sell a zine on the street
Graffiti a business and come by the next day offering to paint over it
Slap a Taxi sign on your car and start picking up lazy, rich and drunk Portlanders
Host a “charity run” for yourself
Sell space on your body for advertising
Become a loan shark
Work repo
Become a bounty hunter like The Dog (upside: score big, downside: you’d have to move to Gresham for the summer)
Fish in the Willamette and sell your catch at the Farmer’s Market
Tell fortunes, palm read, work some tarot cards (purple turban with a feather and mysterious accent required)
Sell the Willamette Weekly “Newsies” style on the street corner for $1 (cabbie hat, suspenders and the phrase “Extra, extra! Read all about it!” required)
Do magic tricks (preferably tricks that require participants’ wallets and watches)
Become a paparazzi photographer (Monica Lewinsky lives in the Pearl – her mug might still sell for a few bucks)
Learn to count cards and hit up the casinos on the coast
Turn your station wagon into a hearse and become a cut-rate body collector
Harvest earthworms and sell them as bait
Steal pets and return them for rewards or adopt pets from the pound that look like lost pets on posters and return them for a reward
Adopt a few mutts from the pound and start making puppies – just make up some French sounding breed name and sell the pups for $300 and no one will know the differences
Become a pool shark (do not attempt at cowboy bars, you will get your ass kicked if you’re found out)
Sell dime bags of Oregano to high school kids
Start a handlebar peddicab service
Start a call-in televangelist show on cable access
Start a phone sex service on your cell phone
Comb the beach with a metal detector for buried treasure
Participate in medical trials
Build a raft and give romantic gondola rides on the Willamette
Dress as a firefighter and have people put money in our boot at intersections
Act as a note taking surrogate for someone in the their summer class
Sell a kidney on the black market (it can be yours or someone else’s, all you need is chloroform and bathtub filled with ice)

Here are some facts from the book I'm reading:

Each year, 75 million Americans are sickened by the food they eat;
an estimated 67 million birds are killed by the millions of pounds of toxic agricultural pesticides sprayed on crops;
and factory farms confining cattle, hogs, chickens, and turkeys produce enough manure waste to fill 52 million large 18-wheeler semi-trucks—a “convoy of excrement,” as Cook says.
Corporate agri-giants like ConAgra, Premium Standard Farms (PSF), Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland increasingly dominate the food scene, devastating small family farms and wreaking havoc on the environment.
Every half hour, one small family farm folds under the pressures exerted from the increasing corporate control of agriculture.
Those farmers that remain take home only about 19 cents per food dollar spent by the average consumer (this is in comparison to 37 cents in 1980 and 47 cents in 1952).
Expensive slotting fees charged by grocery stores for product placement destroy the hopes of any independent producers who try to sell their products directly to grocery stores. Government farm subsidies, mostly directed to the wealthiest producers, further handicap small-scale producers.

Isn't that a bit overwhelming? What we can do is buy local, pesticide free, seasonal produce from locally owned grocery stores. We can buy meat that is raised in our region in actual pastures. Mad Cow disease was first spread in the early 80's when the industry began rendering left over animal parts into high protein slurries that were constituted into pellets and fed to cows who are herbivores.
This practice continued until 1997 but those same rendered animal parts are still in our medicine, candy and designer soaps.
We can compost, recycle and must begin gardening instead of landscaping. These measures can go a long way to changing our public perception of food but can't change to broken system. What has to change is public policy concerning food because food cannot be subject to the free market. We have to support measures to prevent further conglomeration within the food production and distribution industries. We have to support subsidies to family owned farms and make sure our representatives vote in favor of high food tariffs. We have to stop expecting bananas and asparagus in December and eat what is around us because the out of season, artificially cheap food we pay for now is stealing from our food wealth in the future.
Even in the 70's tests indicated most women's breast milk would be illegal to sell because it contains so many pesticides and even lead. Soil is eroding, companies like Monsanto have produced self sterilizing seeds, animals are diseased and polluting our water ways, produce is coated in pesticides and are genetically altered, grocery stores are decreasing in number and increasing in size and industry has even started to treat water as a proprietary commodity subject to private ownership. We have to get freaked out about these things, there is a coming food crisis that may even be too late to stop.